Several months ago, I was looking at a question posted on ask.sqlservercentral.com. I discovered an answer to a question regarding how to move a large amount of data around quickly. The solution was related to an aspect of table partitioning that I was not aware of. If you aren’t familiar with partitions in SQL Server, you can “divide” up a table into different segments or partitions. Often this is found in large tables (think millions/billions of rows) in order to quickly and efficiently move data around. Moving partitions around is a meta-data operation which is what makes it so efficient.